Gauzy Longing

Campos-Pons uses sound, smell, and sight to transport her audience into an engrossing environment. The gallery walls are painted a mossy green and are sumptuously thicketed with black line drawings of leaves and trees. Scattered throughout the space are fresh herbs atop footstools covered with wax-dipped photocopies of plants. Three carved wooden columns rising from the center of the gallery reference Santería's sacred trees. Each sits on an island of cornmeal and houses an aluminum casserole pan tucked into a niche the artist carved into the trunk's base. The pans are reminiscent of the iron calderos, or cauldrons, used by santeros for spiritual offerings and which the artist's mother often used herself.

In the four corners of the room rest garabatos — hooked staffs used by herbalists to snare plants before harvesting them with machetes — as well as the emblem of Elegua, keeper of the crossroads and the messenger between the gods and men.

On a wall outside, Campos-Pons calls down Elegua in Abridor de Caminos (The One Who Opens the Path), a composition of 10 large Polaroid photos. It is one of several of her performance-based works, in which she ritualistically offers fragments of her body to the fickle trickster god.

The artist's most intimate invitation to reverie comes by way of Spoken Softly with Mama, a sweeping installation in which Campos-Pons celebrates the spirit of three generations of females in her family, with her mother at the center. Its themes are domestic labor — memories and daydreams shared during the drudgery and uprootedness.

In the antechamber, embroidered white sheets are stacked atop three ebony tables. One pile reads, "For Beauty," the next "For Necessity," and the last "For Survival."

Entering the main installation space, spectators glimpse three more piles of crisply ironed and folded bed linens. They nest in an alcove as overhead videos project moving images onto them. Some scenes show a closeup of the artist's hand scattering pearls; others depict her embroidering sheets or folding them.

Across from these works, seven huge ironing boards are arranged like an altar and covered with black-and-white photo transfers of Campos-Pons's kin and projections of the artist performing. A melancholic sound piece plays songs from her youth. Dozens of cast-glass irons fan out armadalike toward the viewer. One video projection shows the artist squeezing a ripe pomegranate as its blood-red seeds slip through her fingers. Another image captures her stringing rose petals into a necklace.

The ruptured flow of history and the discovery of meaning through the gauzy haze of memory are journeys the artist's compass negotiates beautifully.